The Epic question: How Google lost when Apple won | How is Google running an illegal monopoly with the Play store — while Apple’s App Store is in the clear?::How is Google running an illegal monopoly with the Play store — while Apple’s App Store is in the clear?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It’s a fight that Apple previously (mostly) won in a similar trial in 2021, beating claims that it had violated antitrust laws by charging mandatory in-app transaction fees and kicking Epic’s game Fortnite off the App Store.
Google tried a similar move, but in its case, a jury found it had maintained an unlawful monopoly with the Play store; a judge is scheduled to consider remedies next month.
Epic’s lawyers could present details about these agreements and argue they showed Google using its power in one layer of the phone market to shut down competition in another.
But Google’s own internal emails and strategic plans clearly showed that those execs wanted to block rival app stores, and the jury was here for it.
It turned out that Google had set all one-on-one chats to automatically delete themselves after 24 hours by default, and employees all the way up to the CEO intentionally used that to make certain conversations disappear.
Not only did the jury see this, at least one juror decided that Sundar Pichai wasn’t credible on the stand, and that the deleted chats were a factor in their decision to give Epic the win.
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The legal system is hilariously broken across the board. I’m on both Apple and Google’s sides in this fight against Epic making a buck off their ecosystems at the expense of the consumer.
All three corporations involved are scumbags trying to game the broken legal system to profit at the expense of the consumer. None of them deserve your support. You should be able to buy what you want and emjoy, in a manner that’s convenient for you, at a reasonable price, without having to navigate a labyrinth of corporate deals and user agreements.
At the end of the day, this was kind of a different legal battle. Google negotiated one-off deals with big tech companies, and some of those companies are getting better deals than their competitors.
Apple doesn’t appear to do that. The marketplace has one set of rules that apply to everyone. Spotify doesn’t have different a AppStore contract than Tidal.
For all we know, Google may have won this case if they simply made everyone abide by the same contract. Playing king maker kind of fucked them.
This is the answer.
Apple wasn’t abusing their monopoly, while “Don’t Be Evil” Google was colluding to protect theirs.
A monopoly is inherently abusive. It abuses centralized power to gain more power. But I would argue that Apple built their monopoly “honestly” from the ground up, and from day one the rules haven’t changed. Google started with an open platform, and sneakily changed the rules and made deals to get their monopoly.
Both are objectively bad. But Google’s method was more open to legal scrutiny, in hindsight.
Apple change the rules right under people’s apps all the time, in much more scumbag ways, e.g. https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/16/22676706/apple-watch-swipe-keyboard-flicktype-lawsuit-kosta-eleftheriou
As much as I don’t like epic mega games as a game company I don’t think a company should get a cut of every purchase made in an app on their platform. Sure if you want to use googles or apples payment gateway, but you shouldn’t have too.
